Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Sunday, August 19, 2012

Identity and Israeli Exceptionalism

In 2011 Mick Davis, a leader of
the Anglo Jewish community, created a firestorm of controversy when he urged
the prime minister of Israel to “find a way to take a great advance” in the
Peace Process.His entreaties to Bibi
Netanyahu would have had greater currency if he had acknowledged the issues
that weigh down the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was a huge failure for him.To understand why this relationship between Israel, Diaspora Jewish communities and the non-Jewish
communities remain so sodden with complexity we need to examine it from Israel’s side.

Transparency is a difficult
concept to reconcile with security in a country surrounded by enemies whose
theological and philosophic constructs are racist (pan-Arab) and religiously
supremacist (Islam). A nation that is reliant on secrecy and ambiguity to
survive must display sophistication in its approach to both enemies and friends.Israeli politics is unfortunately too often
neither of these things. It is loud, intemperate and usually lacking in nuance.

Leadership has been undermined
because Jewish values which should unite the nation have been relegated to the
home where they have no chance of impacting the external environment.Sectarian point scoring and one-upmanship has
replaced ethical debate, leaving most secular people to have little faith in
the religious establishment. But this also weakens identity. The clergy cannot
reflect on matters of a spiritual nature while they sup at the table of
government. The Rabbis of old often warned against the dangers of corruption
that power wrought. The Jewish people were powerless for most of the last 2½
millennia. Today religious and secular politicians co-habit the same political
space and they do so without reference to traditional Jewish values.Ethical guidance is reserved for tribal kith
and kin or is wholly absent.Each speaks
a language which is separate to and limits the possibility of communion with
others outside of their community of interest.Our politicians should lead from the front. By creating consensus they can
unite not just their own ideological community but the nation too. Their
failure to effectively communicate across multiple divides is an overwhelmingly
political failure of vision, both personal and national.

My father said that you build
your life around your family; you do not build your family around your
life.This works at every level of
identity.The politics of provincialism
creates conflict and disequilibrium because there will always be winners and
therefore losers in the whore-house of coalition government.With increasing factional division there
occurs an escalating probability of obstructed justice. Communities compete
against each other rather than supporting each other.

The debate in the USA between isolationism and its opposite,
American exceptionalism, is mirrored in Israel. The difference is that America is a
willing participant in the debate. Israel is not. The idea that any
country is unique (hence exceptional), that it has a mission to spread its
world-view (in the case of the USA
it is democracy, freedom and equality) outside its borders will only work when
that nation willingly has a vision to extend past those borders.The task of surviving in a hostile
geopolitical neighbourhood does not prevent Non Government Organisation’s (NGO’s)
from participating in Israel’s
national debate nor does it prevent them from holding Israel to
account when it violates its own laws. But one-sided criticism is not constructive;
it is interference, and it inevitably achieves the opposite by highlighting the
dishonesty and therefore the clear conflict of interest in the argument.Preaching someone else’s values only works
when one is consistent and not influenced by a perceptually dishonest agenda at
variance with the truth, or at least, with a different version of the truth.

Israel,
by virtue of its emergent identity constantly defines itself by comparing and
contrasting its actions and behaviours with that of other nations. As a Jewish island
buffeted by an Islamic ocean; as an ethnically kaleidoscopic state threatened
by a monolithic and aggressive Arab hegemon; Israel is a society of immigrants
and refugees, of Israelis whose history is denied and falsified for the
convenience of others. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that most Israelis do
not willingly engage in a debate about identity except at the fringes of
society. And even then, it is with the intent to nullify any progress towards
equality. For example, Neturei Karta (a Jewish anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox
sect) regards the Jewish Nation as being obliged to live in exile until the
coming of the messiah. But by their appearance at Holocaust denial conferences
in Iran,
in support of their passionate hatred of Israeli sovereignty, they repel most
secular Israelis and keep them from the synagogue. A further example is the
extreme Left which demands that Israel
behave in an exemplary manner even while the pressures of external threat and nation
building continues unabated.By refusing
to acknowledge any but a myopic Arab or racist Muslim narrative they lose any
right to contribute to the debate.This
is the reason NGO’s object so strongly to their programs inside of Israel and the Palestinian Territories
being distinctly identified with donor detail. Israel
is often forced to practise ‘havlagah’ (self-restraint) in the face of enemy
action but belligerency by Israel’s
‘friends’ creates fatigue and diminishes the influence of those who demand it.

While I may be embarrassed by
some of the more awkward acts carried out on behalf of the State of Israel I do
not live there and my right to a visceral reaction is tempered by acknowledging
the emotive and therefore personal nature of my response.

Israel
is only a disaster to those people who demand Israeli Exceptionalism, knowing it can never be delivered.Nations may hold themselves to
different standards and that is their crutch which we choose to share, or not. The
Nakba (the Islamic loss of territory to the infidel in Palestine in 1948) is the narrative many in
the West support even as they arrogantly interpret the event as a Jewish
land-grab. But the Arab defeat in 1948 can only ever be viewed in theological
terms in spite of its human costs. In human terms it was a disaster for both
sides. But disasters are easy to portray in Manichaean terms because facile
arguments persuade facile people and sell ideas as easily as they sell ideologies
and newspapers. Reductive journalism pulls at the heartstrings without necessitating
any thought. It is ‘sound bite’ journalism at its ugliest. The Nakba is only a
disaster for the racists who believe that Jews never had the right to free
immigration, religious freedom and freedom from fear or threat of violence; in
summary to self-determination. The Nakba is an Arab disaster. The Nakba is an
Islamic disaster. Neither Arab nor Muslim sees fit to acknowledge the Jewish
right to independence.On 18th August
2012 Ahmadinejad in his speech to mark al-Quds day said that "The very
existence of the Zionist regime is an insult to humanity." He added
“Zionist presence on even one centimeter of Palestinian land was dangerous.” And
today, Ali Khamenei, Iran’s
supreme religious leader and therefore the man controlling the strings of power
in Iran blamed "many of the
Islamic world’s problems” on Israel
along with the usual obscene references to cancer.

Those Muslims that hang both Baha’i
and homosexuals as proof of their tolerance cannot preach the superiority of
their faith to anyone but themselves.Those
that commit rape against demonstrators will no doubt be honoured by the UN and courted
by nations like China and Switzerland for
their oil.But if there is true evil in
this world, it is they that uphold this delusional Iranian theocracy with every
breath of their being. It is neither humanity nor politics that drives their
zeal but religious mania, a theology that mandates captured territory as
eternal Islamic patrimony (part of conquest philosophy known as Dar al-Harb). Mirroring
ancient Israel’s
relationship with ancient Rome,
modern Jewish independence highlights deprived minority rights throughout the
Islamic world.

The true narrative can either be
that the Jewish ‘people’ are members of the family of nations or, of a nation,
weak and isolated, confronted by a broad front of hostile Arab and Western
nations, a diabolic conspiracy between Muslim states and a Western coalition of
anti-Semitic and unreconstructed Liberal bigots.

Rhetoric helps to mould this
view. Israeli self-defence is always communicated as revenge. Anti-Zionist
propaganda is resolute in concealing any threats or prior provocations.
Attempts by Israel
to protect itself from its enemies are always condemned or qualified with a
patronising debate about Jewish or Zionist paranoia. Israel has no right to constructively
or dynamically protect its’ citizens, something that we take for granted when
we permit every nation the right to security.

So we return to Identity. Israel’s detractors are more often than not
preoccupied with masking their own prejudice by imposing peace-time standards on
Israel while Israel is still
at war or at best fighting a cold peace.And the only way to justify their prejudice is to rewrite Jewish or
Israeli (Zionist) history to fit their own bigoted narrative and agenda. (See
my comments on Ilan Pappe - The Spy Chronicles. “There is no such thing as
truth, only a collection of narratives”)

According to an essay by Evan R.
Goldstein (“Reconciling the hyphens of identity”) “Harold Rosenberg argued that
in a free society identity is more an act of will than an accident of birth and
he defined it as ‘the problem of the voluntary aspect of modern identity.’ It
is this very freedom that contains the seeds of so much terror, he continued. ‘People
freely choose to subject themselves to totalitarian disciplines in order to be
something,’ Rosenberg
writes. ‘Perhaps even more, however, in order to quiet the anguish of
possibility.’ It is the anguish of possibility - and the attendant feelings of
isolation, homelessness, insecurity, and anxiety - that is at the heart of the
crisis in Europe.American citizenship, never a biological
construct, extends a reciprocal offer to its immigrants: a national identity
you can both assume and shape.”

Israel
as a nation has a history in the region that is one of being a persecuted and
ultimately eliminated minority as well as one of deep attachment to the land.
By identifying with a history that is at least 3,000 years old and Jewish in
terms of history, culture, civilisation and religion, it acts as a
counterweight to an Islamic and Arab story that is one of ethnic invasion,
conquest, cultural occupation, subjugation and denial.An Arab and Islamic compulsion to rewrite history
in their own image, to obliterate an unsavoury past is reason enough for Israel
to continue to reassert its attachment to the land and, if anything, even more
of a reason to reinforce its visual identity. Why should the State of Israel
not have a Star of David on its flag?It
is the symbol of our political independence and the blue lines denote our
religious identity (as in the strands of the talit). What is central to the
identity of the majority of people within the State is nothing to which we need
to be ashamed. Autonomy has been demanded by Muslim religious fascists in Birmingham and Leeds, both cities in Northern
England with large Muslim populations.Autonomy or institutional independence means
forfeiting the right to a national vision.Extremist elements within the Arab sector (whether of the left or the
right) would soon exploit this with the active assistance of foreign agents and
foreign NGO’s.That is the nightmare
scenario.It is not multiculturalism nor
is it Palestinian identification.

A national identity is dependent
on having a basic vision of society while actively demonstrating tolerance for
those who diverge from that vision.There is a not too subtle difference between celebrating diversity and
appeasing those whose aim it is to undermine and ultimately to destroy from
within, the nation state.That
difference is the difference between mutual respect and a contemptuous minority
subverting the host society in order to destroy it.

This is the first of two articles on identity and Israeli exceptionalism.